The Coma of Console Gaming

For a long time now, I’ve been vehemently denying it, like any good fanboy should. However, after recent times, there’s just no denying it- consoles, that is to say, the Xbox, the PS3, and the Wii (my preference for them in descending order, and mind you I’ve only ever touched a PS3 twice, that says something about the Wii) have slipped into the dark, turbulent coma that is casual gaming. Microsoft and Sony seem content to rush after the new casual gaming market, and they’ve left all of us traditional gamers to find other methods of obtaining what we love. For me, this method is temporarily morphing into a PC gamer like some sort of horrendous temporary butterfly. Or maybe a moth, or some kind of crustacean.

I quickly began to enjoy the idea of being a temporary PC gamer when I met Steam- a joyful little application that hardly uses up any physical memory in the background (when it doesn’t feel like being a random bitch and decides to absorb 100,000K of memory), and allows you to download and play a plethora of games on any computer you like, so long as you are logged in with your Steam account. You probably already know the mechanics, so I’m not going to explain it to you, and if you don’t, just look it up on Wikipedia.

However, I have also had some inherent problems with Steam recently. The main one is download rates. Mostly that they’re shit. Completely shit. I can get a two MB/s download speed with my internet connection, yet with Steam downloads, I’m lucky to get 500 KB/s. I don’t know why, but it always STARTS good, with 1.4 MB/s or something, but then it just slowly drops until it’s hit 30 KB/s or so, and it stays that way until it decides to spike up for a few minutes, and then drop back down again, and over and over until the download is finally fucking finished. I wouldn’t mind if it was just CONSISTENT, instead of giving me false hope with the huge starting download rate, they could just give me like 300 KB/s constantly, and I would be… amicable with that.

Anyway. I believe that consoles have entered the coma of casual games, from which one day they will awaken, and come back to kick ass and chew bubble gum and hug me and wuv me and let me play the final chapter of everyone’s favorite theoretical physicist’s adventures and also play as the frazzled girl with the shiny gun that shoots inter-dimensional doors on her quest for cake and ANSWERS. But until then, I’m going to be playing Serious Sam and Doom and Half Life: Source and Call of Duty: World at War and Counter Strike: Source and Portal and Quake II and Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead and Fallout 3 and Killing Floor and Bioshock and Poker Night at the Inventory and Plants vs. Zombies and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl UNTIL THE MOTHERFUCKING COWS COME HOME!!!

One Response to “The Coma of Console Gaming”

Also, I thoroughly enjoy this particular quote
“For me, this method is temporarily morphing into a PC gamer like some sort of horrendous temporary butterfly. Or maybe a moth, or some kind of crustacean.”

Quick question cause I’m too lazy to tab over to wikipedia. MUST you be connected to the internet to play games on Steam?